Heretofore, as well as presently, many manufacturing plants have employed conveyors for the movement of manufactured parts and for the movement of scrap to certain areas of the plant as part of the overall system or processes for the manufacturing of the related goods.
It has not been unusual to have conveyors of such a substantial length as to make it prohibitive, time-wise and energy-wise, to stop the movement of the conveyor in order to load goods or scrap onto the conveyor or to unload goods or scrap from the conveyor. This becomes increasingly evident when one considers a moving conveyor which, in its circuit, passes a plurality of loading and/or unloading stations or area.
The prior art has attempted to load, for example, buckets carried by a continuously moving conveyor by seeking to time the discharge of scrap or goods from an associated dumping means and into a conveyor carried bucket as such conveyor and bucket moved generally toward and past such associated dumping means. Regardless of the accuracy of the timing of the discharge it is not unusual for some of the discharged goods or scrap to miss the moving bucket and fall to the floor.
The prior art has also attempted to load conveyor buckets, or more generically carriers, by causing a carrier to be momentarily held back, while the overall conveyor continued its movement, and during such a momentary stoppage of a carrier dumping the goods or scrap onto the carrier. This approach has not proven to be successful in that the momentary stopping or holding back of a carrier has shown to result in such carrier swinging much as a pendulum and thereby again resulting in some of the goods or scrap being discharged by the associated dumping means effectively missing the swinging carrier and falling as to the building floor.
The prior art has proposed various other specific systems some of which for a time disengage the bucket or carrier from the power drive of the overall conveyor to thereby have disengaged bucket or carrier standing still as to receive goods and/or scrap from an associated dumping means.
Many of the prior art systems are of limited effectiveness, or complicated and overly costly.
The invention as herein disclosed is primarily directed to the solution of the aforestated as well as other related and associated problems of the prior art.